Upcoming: Talking to the Dead/ Zombie Apcalypse

Researcher and author Bill Birnes has uncovered another bitter Edison vs. Tesla rivalry and will discuss how Edison’s little-known near-death experience formed his theory that animate life forms don’t die, but rather change the nature of their composition – with Tesla monitoring Edison’s paranormal work, both men raced to create a device that picked up the frequencies of spirits that would allow us to speak to the dead.

When humankind faces what it perceives as a threat to its very existence, a macabre thing happens in art, literature, and culture: corpses begin to stand up and walk around. The dead walked in the fourteenth century, when the Black Death and other catastrophes roiled Europe. They walked in images from World War I, when a generation died horribly in the trenches. They walked in art inspired by the Holocaust and by the atomic attacks on Japan. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the dead walk in stories of the zombie apocalypse. Greg Garrett, author and Baylor University professor, will discuss how this ‘’apocalypse’’ became an archetypal narrative for the contemporary world and how these stories can also offer us wisdom about living in a community with real-world ethical solutions, and invite us into conversation about the value and costs of survival.